Working on a tight marketing budget? Even with limited finances, there are ways to simplify your marketing costs. Here are 5 ways to market yourself on a shoe-string budget and get you competing with bigger players.
1. Use free social networking tools.
Create a Facebook or Twitter profile is easy and it’s the quickest way to reach your customers on a semi-personal level. The platform makes use of your existing contact networks e.g. friends, family. Utilizing the right settings, you can post your ads and business opportunity on their walls and timelines thereby expanding you presence to their friends and followers every time they look at your friends and family’s profiles. Social networks allow you to target a large audience without the expenditure of conventional marketing.
2. Promote yourself to the public.
Have pamphlets and posters printed – the pamphlets can be plain black and white on small piece of paper that are handed out at intersections, or put up the posters along roads where there is traffic. This gives you a face-to-face interaction, albeit brief.You need to give your business a face, and the only way to do this is to be on hand and meeting and greeting customers in and around your stores. If people see the boss handing out flyers, they’ll know that you care about your business and are personally invested in it, and by default them.
3. Use community media for advertising.
Instead of advertising in large national newspapers or magazines, cut your advertising costs by rather running your advertising and marketing campaigns in more localised media.Investigate the costs of placing an advert in a community stop-’n-drop newspaper, then negotiate a deal where you get a discount if you place a number of adverts instead of just one.
4. Set yourself a budget.
For example, instead of using seven colours in a print advert use two or three. This will slash the cost of the advert.
5. Outsource if needed, but try to keep your marketing and advertising in-house.
This will mean that your team will have to come up with solutions during their working hours and you won’t be paying an expert to perform a task that your team can already do. This will also lead to your employees improving their skills and making them more valuable to the team.
Source – AR
